William R. Maples, forensic historian: four men, four centuries, four countries.

Prior to 1984, William R. Maples, Ph.D. worked primarily with Medical Examiners in the State of Florida in investigation of and testimony in criminal cases. In 1984 the Republic of Peru requested him to identify skeletal remains thought to be those of Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru and the Incas in the early 16th Century. Dr. Maples made a positive identification of those remains as Pizarro, resulting in their substitution in a glass-sided coffin in the Cathedral of Lima, where other remains had been displayed as those of Pizarro for a hundred years. In addition, it was proved that the remains removed could not have been those of Pizarro. In 1988, Dr. Maples examined the skeletal remains of Joseph Merrick ("The Elephant Man") at Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, and made photographic studies of them for comparison with death casts of limbs and skull to ascertain depth of tissue by video-superimposition. In 1991, Dr. Maples, headed a team which removed President Zachary Taylor (1779-1842) from his tomb in Louisville, Kentucky. The purpose was to determine if he had been poisoned, as had been proposed by some at the time. Test results showed that he had not been. In 1992, Dr. Maples and a team of forensic specialists went by invitation to Ekaterinburg, Russia to study skeletal remains which the Russians had tentatively identified as the Russian Royal Family, and entourage, murdered in 1918. The American team identified them as Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, three of his children, his physician, and three of his servants. William Ross Maples died in Gainesville, Florida, 27 February 1997.     

How to do things on purpose: R. A. Duff'sIntention,Agency, and Criminal Liability

Conclusion There is a lot of material in this book, and Duff handles most of it very well. It is unfortunate that he felt the need to tie his discussion of serious philosophical questions in the criminal law to larger overarching questions of philosophy. It is possible that current conceptions of intentional action implicate dualism (or Dualism), I suppose, but that would be a book-length discussion all of its own. It would begin with a careful discussion of just what dualism is, and would track down the various ways in which particular substantive positions on intentional action rule out alternatives to dualism. Such a work might be interesting indeed. It would be interesting, for example, to see a discussion of a type of conceptual dualism that I suspect Duff would find congenial: a dualism that insisted upon the autonomy of purposive notions and rejected the causal analysis of intentional action. Would that sort of dualism make any difference at all for the criminal law? It might, and it might not. But in any event that is not what we find in this book, which, for all of its healthy enthusiasm for the place of philosophy in the law shows an excessive tolerance for makeweight arguments about the great questions.     

Justin R. Ellis: Policing Legitimacy: Social Media,Scandal and Sexual Citizenship

Critical Criminology -     

R.S. Thomas: Ministering Otherness

This article is built around a deeply personal `response to text' –of a poem in response to a poem, where both deal with notions of identity. For myself, writing poetry is a cathartic (though infrequent) source of resolution; a space subject to different constraints from those present in the production of analytic scholarship. A consideration of the broader ideological matrix at work behind the poems suggests links between nationhood and language, class and religion, private and public identity, history and politics. Vast subjects, explored but briefly in the thoughts and notes produced for this article as `background' to the story of the poem cited at the end. For legal and political theory it is a reminder of the delicate interstices of influences traversed in any assertion concerning broad policy. As `scholar' I am constrained in the provision of any further assessment of my own process as `poet': what is provided attempts honesty. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.